You go to the zoo and decide to watch the snakes get fed. When you stroll up to the exhibit, there’s a guy there sweating profusely while trying to entice a boa constrictor to eat a pineapple – that’s odd!

Later you find out that the guy with the pineapple isn’t a herpetologist, in fact he’s not even a biologist. He’s a java developer! Well, now we can understand why he may have thought that a pineapple would be something that a snake would eat, instead of a rat or mouse. What was he doing trying to feed that snake?

The question above, what was he doing trying to feed a snake?, sounds like it’s addressing something that is very obviously wrong with the scenario that was described. Most people would guess that a java developer should not be placed in a job that requires someone of a completely different skill set, right? Maybe that’s the case in the scenario described above, but for skill sets that are closely tied yet different, the understanding of who belongs in which role can be a little confusing, especially when a recruiter that is not doing the role themselves has to find candidates to fill the job.

This is where Talent Profiles come into play. I’ll explain more below.

Let’s use the example of a java developer again. What is a java developer? How does that differ from an Android Developer? Here are some core skills that entry-level talent in these professions would need.

Entry-level Java Developer:

Java

Java EE components

Java Web frameworks

ORM

Java Build Tools (Hibernate, Gradle, JPA, etc)

Java application containers

Java testing tools

IoC frameworks

3rd party libraries

XML and/or HTML

SQL

Entry-level Android Developer:

Java

XML

Git

Android SDK

Android Studio

SQL

3rd party libraries

There are similarities and there are differences. Both developers use Java as a core language but have differing skills based on the environments that they work in and the products that they work on. Similar, but not the same. Now, with enough practice either of these candidates should be able to pick up the skills of the other since they have a foundation based on Java, but when you need to fill a requisition that has a very particular ask, it’s important to hone in on the skills and experience that will get this person the job.

Now that both the core and specific requirements are understood, an accurate profile can be drawn up that will ensure that the recruiter/sourcer finding talent for the requisition is able to distinguish which of the thousands of potential candidates in the marketplace could actually be a good fit for the opening.

A recruiter or sourcer can use this method for ANY role that they need to locate talent for. Do your research! Always have a game plan and develop a template around what a good candidate should look like. If you follow this way of thinking, even the hardest openings will be filled.

By Marcus Twyman

It’s interesting recruiting technical talent here in the US. Everyone thinks of the major hubs like Silicon Valley, Bellevue, Boston and New York. Then there are the emerging hot spots like Salt Lake, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami and Detroit. The truth is, almost every major city has begun to send out an S.O.S. for technical talent. Recruiters are hiring for standard opportunities like java developers, full stack engineers, web developers, mobile engineers, but there is also a push for newer skill sets like driver-less car engineers, AI engineers, machine learning engineers, and pretty much anything that breathes life into the internet of things. So much opportunity, but if you ask most recruiters they may start chanting, “So little talent!”

It’s no secret that candidates with H1B visas disproportionately fill technical roles especially around software engineering as compared to other types of positions. What we have been witness to up to this point though, is that even with H1B candidates, offshoring, and an increase in contract opportunities, companies are still unable to meet their technical talent needs, especially in the full time employee space.

This shortage of skilled talent has lead to a loosening of traditional talent acquisition practices and candidate requirements in quite a few companies where not having skilled technical talent in place could bring their businesses to a stand-still. What this means is that employers are really beginning to focus on what skills candidates posses and what they know, rather than whether or not they hold 4 year degrees in Computer Science/Engineering… or whether they even hold a degree at all.

The talent landscape is beginning to wake up to the need that exists and this knowledge has pushed for the expansion of technical trade schools/programs that exist both as brick and mortar centers and online learning spaces.

So, my humble advice to you?…

If you have a baseline understanding of web development or coding in java, if you have always wanted to create a mobile app or have been considering a career change, take the leap and learn to code. Obviously, go about it in the way that is best for you and your current place in life, but don’t spend too much time debating. We have a need, employers are feeling the pressure, and technical trade schools are building some valuable partnerships with the companies and brands in their markets that are starving for coders, web designers, and data enthusiasts. If you truly want to change the direction of your career, do the research, make a plan, and put in the time and energy to make it happen. If there’s a will, there’s a way… and as of right now, there are a lot of doors that are slightly ajar, just waiting for you to kick them open.

To help you on your way, I thought I would put some resources here for you to take advantage of.

I would highly recommend this site as a first resource for you. The best thing about this site, it’s FREE. The other? You get to work on real world assignments for non-profits, which allows you to build a portfolio and gain real coding experience by donating your coding to build out your resume and client list.

Here is a list of the trade schools/boot camps (expensive) that give you a full immersive, bootcamp, experience. They typically take around 3 months to complete and are treated like jobs. The goal is for you to complete the course and immediately be able to step into an entry-level technical role.

Hopefully, this helps those of you who have been contemplating taking the leap into a technology focused career. Just remember, there are no guarantees, and even though the industry is thirsty for talent, it doesn’t mean that you’ll have to work less, in fact, to prove that you’ve got what it takes without a degree or experience in coding, etc., you’ll have to work harder than those that have the typical credentials. Do the work, to get the reward. Read the article below for some inspiration and an outline of how one such individual accomplished their goal of becoming a software engineer.

So, you’re sitting at your desk, trying to login to LinkedIn Recruiter and for some reason you’re unsuccessful. What’s going on? A coworker walks by, noticing your anxiety-ridden plea that you keep issuing to your computer screen to let you have access, and says, “Didn’t you see the email from talent acquisition? We’re not using LinkedIn Recruiter anymore.”

What? Not using LinkedIn Recruiter? Has the world gone mad? As your coworker saunters away, you’re left feeling dazed and confused. All of your saved projects, searches, and starred candidates are in LinkedIn Recruiter. Now what are you going to do?

Ok, so that scenario is a little dramatic, but if you’re a sourcer, or a recruiter who also sources, then I bet you have a little knotted ball still sitting in the pit of your stomach after envisioning that scenario.

It’s unfortunate, but the recruiting industry as a whole has systematically made itself dependent on LinkedIn’s paid platform levels to find talent. Gone are the days when a sourcer would create an organizational chart of a target company to then fill in with names and source candidates from. Cold calling? Is that when you stand outside in the winter to make a call from your cell phone?

It’s easy to poke fun at what sourcers and recruiters don’t do in the current talent marketplace, but ultimately, it is the talent acquisition departments within each corporation that have weaned us off of actual sourcing and onto a reliance on LinkedIn’s product offerings.

So how does someone find a solution to a scenario like the one described earlier? How do we prevent the loss of data that’s been scraped and collected by our talent teams? Well, the answer is multifaceted. It would involve the use of a proprietary CRM or database (or a spreadsheet at worst) and more focus on old school recruiting and sourcing practices. I’ll highlight some best practices that I always push across to the teams that I train and support that surround LinkedIn usage. These tips are designed to allow sourcers to still leverage LinkedIn for locating candidates but also facilitates the use of outside tools and the inherent skills that each source possesses.

Save Your Searches

One major issue with saving your searches within LinkedIn is that should you lose your license, you’ll most likely have to start from scratch in order to rebuild the searches that are commonly used by your sourcing team. This means a major loss in time and productivity, which ultimately affects revenue and ROI. Maybe you don’t pay attention to that, but someone in the upper echelons does, so we want to make sure that when a repeated search comes through that we can act very quickly to locate candidates.

A suggestion that every sourcer should live by is to save your searches externally. What that means is somewhere on your computer (or on a cloud storage account preferably) there should be basic Boolean and x-ray strings for all successful searches that you’ve run in the past.

Example of saved x-ray strings:

I have an ongoing document that has probably close to 1000 separate searches for LinkedIn and Indeed. When I have a new search I just open my document hit Ctrl+F and then modify any highlighted strings to fit my current search parameters. Once I have a newly modified string that returns good results, I save it to the list for the next time that I need a similar search run.

Even with a free LinkedIn account you can use these strings to find talent through Google. You may not be able to InMail any of the candidates, but you can get around that as well.

find a profile that you want to locate contact info for and highlight the candidate’s name and copy it.

Now start constructing a Boolean string.

“Marcus Twyman” AND

Go back to the profile and take note of the location. Now add that to the string as well but use a tilde, aka ~, in front of the location name. This means that we could get results with similar or synonymous words in them. New York City may come back as NYC or just NY. Hopefully this will help to limit any loss of results due to imperfect location matches.

“Marcus Twyman” AND ~“new York city”

Now add “phone” to the string and some Boolean wildcards around the @ symbol so that Google searches for an email address.

“Marcus Twyman” AND ~“new York city” AND “phone” OR “*@*.com”

Here are a few results that the string was able to pull from across the web.

All of the results above have accurate contact info in them. You may come across multiple listings with conflicting information in them but it is your job as a sourcer to play detective and track down information by using what you already know about each candidate. Where do they live? What titles have they had? What companies have they worked for? All of these questions allow us to attempt to construct an accurate profile of those candidates that we want to engage with. You’ll get some right and some wrong, but you’ll get better and better at finding information the more that you practice this type of sourcing.

You can also source LinkedIn with an X-ray string designed to find contact details such as phone numbers and email accounts. Construct your x-ray string as usual and then add in components to tell Google to only locate profiles that display this data.

Example String:

((site:www.linkedin.com (inurl:linkedin.com/pub/ OR inurl:linkedin.com/in/)) AND -dir) AND (“tax analyst” OR (“tax manager” OR “senior tax manager”))) AND (“*@gmail.com” OR “*@hotmail.com” OR “*@yahoo.com” OR *@live.com OR “*@*.com”) AND (“Washington D.C. Metro Area” OR “DC” OR Alexandria OR Bethesda OR arlington) -networking -recruiter

Here are some results from using the string on Google.

Another way to use LinkedIn is through a custom search engine or “CSE”. This is helpful if you are not comfortable building out your own x-ray strings. You can find a CSE designed for x-ray searching LinkedIn below.

So to recap, don’t save all of your projects and candidate profiles within LinkedIn Recruiter or you could lose all of your hard work. Do use x-ray and Boolean searches to find highly targeted candidate profiles and to locate contact information for those candidates across the web.

Adhering to these guidelines will make searching LinkedIn for talent more productive and result in both present -state and future-state successes.

I’ve encountered quite a few recruiters that have had to run searches for candidates in European countries. One of the main ways to locate the talent in these markets is to LEARN about your target market.

What Does “Learn About Your Target Market” Mean?

Think about the searches that you’ve conducted here state side, what did you do to target a specific area for talent? Did you look for phone number area codes? Postal codes? City names surrounding the major markets that you need to find talent for? There’s nothing too unique about the search that you need to run in Europe, just apply the same logic.

Phone Number Area/Dialling Codes For Republic Of Ireland:

Now all we need to do is add these to a Boolean string (this one’s pretty basic, you can make a much more targeted one for your own purposes).

(“software engineer” OR “software developer”) AND (“021” OR “022” OR “023” OR “024” OR “025” OR “026” OR “027” OR “027” OR “029”) AND Ireland AND “cv” AND java -template -sample -recruitment -recruiter -HR -job -jobs -apply

We can also format our basic string into an X-ray string for LinkedIn:

site:ie.linkedin.com/pub OR (ie.linkedin.com/in) AND (“software engineer” OR “software developer”) AND (“021” OR “022” OR “023” OR “024” OR “025” OR “026” OR “027” OR “027” OR “029”) AND Ireland AND java -dir

Or we can even X-ray Xing (big in Europe) but we’ll remove the phone area codes:

site:xing.com/profile AND (“software engineer” OR “software developer”) AND Ireland AND java -dir

Ok, I’ve noticed that as an industry we spend quite a bit of time discussing the process and strategy around talent acquisition. The ways that employer branding, personal branding, diversity and inclusion and social media platforms help create a foundation on which a compelling story and a candidate engagement strategy can be formulated and implemented. But what about the “hunt” for talent? Even if we have the best processes and strategies in place, we still need to ensure that our sourcers and/or recruiters understand how to use those processes to their advantage and that they understand how to find the talent needed to fill their requisitions.

The thing about sourcing is that everyone thinks about it differently. If you’ve ever attended a SourceCon (which I highly recommend that you do if you take sourcing talent seriously) then you’ll notice that to get the same result and to fill the same skill set, sourcers can have widely varying techniques for locating talent from one person to another. This is why it is so important for us to communicate with one another, so that we can step outside of our own way of thinking and try out different methods that some of our counterparts use when finding targeted talent for very specific niche opportunities.

Below, please feel free to take a look at some examples of searches that I’ve conducted when looking for talent:

Image Search For Resumes

This is a search that I usually perform for more technical skillsets but that you can try out with any open requisitions that you may be actively sourcing for. Google is very good at finding what you want which it can then break out into urls, images, maps, videos, etc.

By entering some basic Boolean logic into Google’s search bar and then selecting “images” we can pull resumes from across the web. Please see the example below:

String

~resume AND java developer AND (“gmail.com” OR “hotmail.com” OR “outlook.com”) “fort Lauderdale” OR “ft. lauderdale”

Results

“Natural Language” OR “Natural Speech” Boolean

Put yourself in the shoes of any candidate. What does the candidate worry about when beginning a job hunt? What does a candidate think about when building an online profile or writing a blog post? How does a candidate most likely construct the sentences that they are sharing on the web? What point of view does a potential candidate usually write in? To get an idea of what I’m talking about, just go look at a LinkedIn profile of a candidate that you’ve recently tried contacting or read through any number of resumes that are saved on your computer. You will typically see that online profiles are written in first person point of view (on occasion you’ll see some third person point of view as well) while resumes are usually written in third person point of view but avoid using the words “she”, “he”, “her”, and “his”.

These details are important when running a search using Natural Speech Boolean because you’re using quotations around full sentences or common statements seen on resumes and profiles.

Your results will not always be neat, clean, pdf files or profile pages. Instead, you may find quite a few Q&A sites where a candidate has commented with matching criteria, or even blogs/sites that the user has posted some personal data on. This is a great way to find niche talent that maybe is not easy to locate through traditional means. Please see the example below:

String

~resume AND “I’m a*” OR “currently working” AND “responsible for” “java developer” OR “java engineer” AND “Location..San Francisco” AND “gmail.com” OR “hotmail.com”

Results

Notice the bolded words and information within each of the returned search results pictured below. You’re looking for information on people that have the skills you’re hunting for. Once you’ve identified those people through the results you should hopefully be able to reach out to them through info that they’ve posted online. Give it a try and play around with it. It may become a new favorite technique of yours!

Custom Search Engines “CSE”

One of the main things that I start new recruiters off with is how to use LinkedIn thoroughly. Whether we agree with it or not, LinkedIn is probably the first tool that most recruiters will fall back on once they get an open requisition. So how do we ensure that they are making the most of searching through all of the profiles that LinkedIn houses?

I implement a triple-search strategy in regards to LinkedIn.

First, search LinkedIn using the advanced filters and ALWAYS use Boolean logic in all of the search fields. The next thing I urge recruiters and sourcers to do is to pull LinkedIn profiles through Google by utilizing an X-ray string. The last method of searching LinkedIn should be through a CSE (click here to use one I put together).

I have yet to have a search run using all three of these methods produce the exact same candidates. I always find other profiles that I would not have found by using LinkedIn’s platform alone.

Screenshot

These are just a few methods that can be used to locate talent, but there are quite a few more that can also be implemented in your sourcing search strategy. I’ll be sure to put an article up on X-ray searching and other techniques but for now, please feel free to try out the ones that I’ve outlined above.

Happy Sourcing!

]]>https://purplesquirreldiaries.com/2016/05/31/different-kinds-of-talent-search-methods/feed/0purplesquirreldiarieslooking for something.jpgexecutive-recruitment.jpgIs This A Way To Leverage The Massive User Base Of SnapChat For The Recruiting Industry?
https://purplesquirreldiaries.com/2016/05/24/is-this-a-way-to-leverage-the-massive-user-base-of-snapchat-for-the-recruiting-industry/
https://purplesquirreldiaries.com/2016/05/24/is-this-a-way-to-leverage-the-massive-user-base-of-snapchat-for-the-recruiting-industry/#respondTue, 24 May 2016 19:48:59 +0000http://purplesquirreldiaries.co/?p=137

So, not too long ago I mentioned trying to use Snapchat as a way to engage with potential candidates in my article titled What’s The Root Of Your Sourcing Woes?. The problem was trying to figure out how to use the platform to gain viewership and positive candidate engagement.

Recruitingsocial.com released an article that gives what I believe to be, a great way to implement snapchat into a brand’s employer branding campaign. It involves using a Geofilter and a customized template.

Please take a look and let me know if what they’ve outlined seems like a strategy that could potentially benefit your employer brand initiatives. I’d be willing to try it out, who knows, maybe I will!

]]>https://purplesquirreldiaries.com/2016/05/24/is-this-a-way-to-leverage-the-massive-user-base-of-snapchat-for-the-recruiting-industry/feed/0purplesquirreldiariesSnapchat-large.jpgrecruited on snapchat.PNGNew Tech Hubs… There’s Now More Than Just Silicon Valley
https://purplesquirreldiaries.com/2016/05/17/new-tech-hubs-theres-now-more-than-just-silicon-valley/
https://purplesquirreldiaries.com/2016/05/17/new-tech-hubs-theres-now-more-than-just-silicon-valley/#respondWed, 18 May 2016 02:58:57 +0000http://purplesquirreldiaries.co/?p=128

Ok all of you tech-savvy recruiters and sourcers. We talk about sourcing strategies, neat Chrome extensions, etc. but an area that you should also be well versed in is the market intel surrounding different geographic locations and tech talent hot spots.

Companies are beginning to catch up with the way that talent researches and engages with different potential employers which is why they are putting much more focus on employer branding, candidate engagement and social media platform usage. This additional focus has allowed these companies/brands to highlight other geographic locations across the country that have budding tech communities.

The cost of employing tech talent in Silicon Valley is astronomically high. The perks, salaries, bonuses, and in some cases the “work day” schedule can all be draining on employers in the San Francisco Bay Area especially if they are not mostly focused on technology, but instead, employ technical talent to support several different lines of business. For this reason there have been major investments in cultivating and nurturing developmental programs in other more affordable markets which have now become almost like smaller tech-incubators.

Read the article from Mashable to see where you could potentially target your sourcing efforts with your clients and possibly convince your hiring teams to either allow for remote opportunities or maybe even consider developing offsite tech teams if there are no satellite offices currently in the area.

]]>https://purplesquirreldiaries.com/2016/05/17/new-tech-hubs-theres-now-more-than-just-silicon-valley/feed/0purplesquirreldiariesseattle.jpgWhich Apps Are On Your Smartphone?
https://purplesquirreldiaries.com/2016/05/12/which-apps-are-on-your-smartphone/
https://purplesquirreldiaries.com/2016/05/12/which-apps-are-on-your-smartphone/#respondThu, 12 May 2016 17:59:18 +0000http://purplesquirreldiaries.co/?p=105Hi everyone! So… with all of the talk around mobile recruiting and social media strategies for talent acquisition, I thought it would be a great idea to see which mobile apps people tend to have on their phones.

This isn’t necessarily restricted to other people in the same industry as me, I see this as a chance to collect some interesting data around what people are using on their phones. Popular apps should be the focus of serious recruiting and sourcing professionals since this is how you can get to engage with potential candidates. I mentioned Snapchat in my last article but what other apps could potentially offer up a great way to interact with talent pools and otherwise hard to reach candidates?

*Find The Root Of Your Sourcing Problem*

So, you schedule time to train your sourcers, you show them great Boolean strings, X-ray strings, and share really cool Chrome extensions. Everyone says that they “get it” and then you release them into the world to become sourcing pros. A week later you run reports from your ATS, CRM, and social platforms to see how engagement looks as well as production and…. Nothing has changed? What happened?

Welcome to the world of leading sourcing teams. Don’t worry, many of us have been there. Don’t freak out, don’t complain, try not to cry, all will be OK. We just need to finesse your approach to implementing your sourcing strategy across the team. Grab your notepad, we’re about to deep dive into finding the “root” of your sourcing issues.

*write-up your sourcing strategy*

Perform A “Discovery”… What Is Present Day Like vs Where You Want To Be? Also, Start Building Out Your Sourcing Strategy

To fix your sourcing issues, you must first know what they are. Start at the beginning. Once a sourcer/recruiter gets a requisition to work on, how do they start locating candidates to submit for consideration? Are they diving straight into the ATS? Are they running a quick search through available “talent pools”? Are they posting the job across their own personal and corporately owned social platforms? This is important to understand because based on what you’re recruiting for and which tools are at your disposal, your method may be either slightly or greatly different than that of another organization.

You must:

Identify the current sourcing process that your team is following (is there even a process?) What needs to be reviewed or outright changed?

Understand what tools are available for use which could include not only platforms like LinkedIn, Dice, etc., but also internal talent pools, diversity and inclusion groups, as well as each recruiter’s personal network or talent pipeline.

Create a Sourcing Funnel based on known metrics and market analytics. How many people need to be located, spoken with, forwarded to the hiring team, and then ultimately offered a position in order to meet your hiring initiatives? You can then get a daily and weekly productivity number to help create a structure, around which, your sourcers can gauge their own productivity and keep themselves on track for success.

Start to build out your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd level sourcing tactics. Start with your easiest, readily available route to viable candidates and then add on more complex sourcing strategies after. Ask yourself, “Where can you locate and engage with niche talent that can fill your role the easiest?” After that, where is the next best place or what is the next best sourcer activity that would uncover talent to engage with? Allow your steps to get more difficult progressively. This way you can get your first slate in front of a hiring team quickly and by the time that slate is reviewed you can have a second slate available that took more time to compile if necessary.

*Leverage Social Media To Enhance Candidate Engagement And The Candidate Journey*

Ensure That Your Sourcing Team Is Also Cultivating And Staying Engaged With Potential Candidates Through Social Platforms

Obviously you should make sure that your team is closely following any outlined “Rules Of Engagement” or social media usage guidelines before setting them free in the realm of tweets and updates. Even though it might entail a certain level of trust and monitoring, social media should definitely be one of the main avenues of focus for your sourcing teams. The goal here isn’t to shoot out job descriptions all over the internet, it’s to consistently engage with potential candidates through social platforms that they, the candidates, are consistently utilizing.

What the above snippet means is that a nice portion of the population is consistently using a smartphone to browse through online content. If that’s where 19% of the entire USA population is throughout each day, then why would you not focus on the content that they are viewing when considering your sourcing plan or strategy?

If I were developing a long-term social media plan for sourcing I would definitely utilize the following apps/platforms within my strategy:

Facebook and Facebook Messenger

Pinterest for sharing industry specific infographics and articles

Instagram to share a more personalized image of who I am as a recruiter/sourcer so that candidates can “feel” like they have a connection with me outside of formal emails

Snapchat… haven’t figured this one out yet, but look at this screenshot from snapchat.com

Obviously we aren’t concerned with those snapchatters that are below the legal working age, but I believe that there will probably be more and more uses for this app as its popularity continues to grow. We’re talking about a huge chunk of the Millennial population.

*Keep your eyes open for new apps and platforms to utilize. Just think, “Which apps and social media platforms are the candidates that I need using?” Then try to figure out a way to use those same platforms and apps for communicating and engaging with them.

*Find a way to track ROI on the methods used to source candidates*

Track ROI To Ensure That Your Strategies Are Working… That Means Use Source Codes Or Trackable Links

It is very important to use source codes within your CRM and ATS systems. You may have a team that can create different codes for each resource that you use for sourcing candidates or you may have an easily customizable platform that enables you to create those codes yourself (this all depends on your company’s platforms so you’ll need to research this).

If we look at this from a team level, then maybe you want your team to use a spreadsheet to track candidates that they are moving forward so that they can type in the source of the candidate and any notes regarding the candidate’s individual situation. This is more laborious but it will allow for a much clearer understanding of where your sourcers are having success as well as create a sense of accountability within the sourcing team, especially if you implement a weekly review of each spreadsheet. You will have to customize your approach based on how your company is set up. Just remember that if you can’t easily track where your successes are coming from, then you are potentially wasting time, energy and money that will most definitely affect productivity.

*Implement a plan that will enable and empower your team resulting in boosted confidence*

What’s Wrong With Being Confident?…. NOTHING!

At the end of the day, your goal is to empower your team so that they can not only locate talent, but consistently engage with and groom talent for future roles so that the process of sourcing the candidates in the future becomes easier. When a strategy is in place it gives structure to the entire sourcing process which gives sourcers a foundation to develop their talent pools and communities around.

Unfortunately, many teams wait until there’s a open requisition before attempting to find and engage talent. Even when they wait for the open job, they tend to wait for candidates to apply to the job through job boards or they dive into an ATS or CRM. These habits may work short-term, but eventually the team will funnel through all of the candidates that fit the desired skillset and then panic will set in as they find that no candidates matching the requirements can be found. Let’s nip it in the bud by developing our sourcing teams and finding the roots of the issues that they keep running into. By working from the ground up, we can prevent future sourcing shortages and overly long time-to-fill ratios.

This is just one way to get started with uncovering and fixing/repairing a sourcing strategy. I’m sure that there are many other variations out there so please don’t be afraid to borrow some of the methods listed here while supplementing others with your own.

Please reach out with your own tips and tricks, I’m always happy to hear how others address their sourcing dilemmas.

So I thought, “Why not kick off our discussions with personal branding as a topic?”

I just attended the #EBrandCon in New York City this past week which covered Employer Branding and Recruitment Marketing. As I sat and listened intently to others in my industry like Allison Kruse, Celinda Appleby, and Craig Fisher, I began to realize that today we are putting major emphasis on the overall brand of each employer, but I wonder, how many of us are focused on our own individual brands? Sure, it’s a great topic to discuss with our peers, but when we really self-reflect, are we practicing what we preach? Who does the world think you are when they “see” you online?

What Does Your Online Presence Look Like?

We’re recruiters, sourcers, and talent acquisition pros. We are passionate about our jobs and we work hard to find the talent that our companies or clients want. In a day and age where we are connected to the web in every way, are we doing enough to create a trail online that the candidates we reach out to can follow back to us?

Think of it like this…

When you hear about something that peaks your interest, do you wait for someone to explain more about it to you or do you jump on your smartphone or computer and “Google” it? Well, candidates do the same thing. They want to know that we are who we say we are. They want to hear what we have to say in order to determine if we are worth the conversation or effort of applying to one of our open positions. Make it easy for them to find these things out! Perform a self-audit of your social media platforms and online profiles. Who is the audience that you are speaking to on each platform? Is there any engagement or are you just posting content that you find amusing or interesting and not concerning yourself with your audience? Are you consistent with sharing relevant content or do you tweet once a year about your cat Matilda? Jump in and clean up your online footprint and then create a strategy around how to engage with the candidates that you want to recruit.